Qimonda to ramp up GDDR5 production

According to an article on EETimes, Qimonda is about to increase its output of GDDR5 memory, which must really good news for AMD, as this means that there should be ample supply of memory for its ATI Radeon HD 4870 and the upcoming R700 dual GPU graphics cards.

EETimes are quoting Robert Feurle, Qimonda Vice President Specialty DRAM, saying "GDDR5 lowers manufacturing costs since it is possible to use simple 4-layer boards for memory subsystems". This all sounds like good news to us, as in the end, it's the end-user that will benefit, as the final product will be cheaper.

There was no mention of how much Qimonda was going to increase its output with, but other good news are that Qimonda has started mass production of faster 5Gbps parts, compared to the 4Gbps chips that AMD is currently using on its graphics cards. This might mean that we'll see faster Radeon HD 4870 cards in the near future.

Qimonda is expecting its 1Gbit chips to overtake the 512Mbit chips in terms of volume within three months and this will also solve AMD's board layout when they move from 512MB to 1GB cards, as they won't have to change the PCB design to accommodate more memory. 2Gbit chips aren't expected until 2010, so it doesn't look like we'll see graphics cards going beyond 2GB of memory any time soon.